Martha Kelly

While I research a variety of topics ranging from the late nineteenth century to the present, three basic interests unite my work: poetry, religion and visual culture.

My monograph Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetics is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press. In this project I show how poets negotiated Russia’s relation to modernity through re-envisioning traditional religion in their own work. These modernist poets (I investigate Aleksandr Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak) seek to represent a peculiarly Russian modernity—an “alternative” modernity—that is distinguished for being a specifically religious modernity. Their versions of Russian Orthodox Christianity, and its liturgy, are as unorthodox as they are rich and imaginative, and their poetry emblematizes the increasingly complex place of religion in modern society.

Academic Studies Press recently published a new anthology of Russian modernist poetry that I co-edited with Sibelan Forrester: Russian Silver Age Poetry: Texts and Contexts. In this collection we include not only brief bios and key poems but also manifestoes, correspondence, publicistic writings, memoirs and literary criticism from the dizzyingly rich conversation of the epoch.

I am beginning a new project on contemporary Russian poet, scholar, essayist and translator Olga Sedakova, and on her role in Russian public life. Through her life and work we can better understand the shifting place of the poet in post-Soviet Russian society, even as we see her adapt traditional roles of the literary intelligentsia to new circumstances.

Frequently Taught Courses:

I have taught a range of courses at MU, from Russian Civilization (a large lecture course) to small discussion-based courses (“The Russian Poetic Tradition,” “Russian Modernism,” “Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,” “The Russian Novel”) to language courses from first- to third-year.

In my teaching I frequently incorporate visual culture, encouraging students to draw cross-media comparisons. Film plays some part in practically all the courses I teach. Through reference to visual, verbal and musical compositions, I emphasize the broader cultural movements to which texts respond.